[WIP] X4 Rebirth (working title) - concept stage

[MegaJohnny]

I'm really glad to hear you're looking at implementing this.

The only problem for me with removing highways completely is, how would sub-capital ships get about? Can they be given boost drives to clear the void in a reasonable time?

If not then IMO it would be good to keep the highways in some capacity, just not in the same one-way twisty-turny form Rebirth uses them. The space between stations does desperately need increasing to make the universe feel bigger, but it would be good to avoid too big expanses of space that you'd just be travelling through in a straight line anyway.

[Observe]

The only problem for me with removing highways completely is, how would sub-capital ships get about? Can they be given boost drives to clear the void in a reasonable time?

Sub-Capital ships would get around in sectors that don't have highways much the same as they do in X3 - rather slowly, but we can give them boost-drives if they don't already have them.

Most of the tiny little "decoration" mass-traffic ships will probably be eliminated altogether - or at least significantly reduced. I haven't decided exactly how to deal with them, because some of them are rather cool looking - except right now they are so tiny and the Skunk is so relatively big, that it's impossible to appreciate those small ships they way they are currently scaled. We may need to do something about ship sizes eventually.

I think most people seem to be in agreement that we should keep an improved version of highways in busy sectors, but other less busy sectors may not have highways. In those cases, the smaller ships can still move around, but it will be slower and more dangerous.

[DarthVain]

Great discussion so far.

For me if at all possible is:

1. to have the option to trade myself with stations and trader ships which IMO should never have been taken away.
2. navigate from one place to another without the use of highways but most importantly the use of hyper drives and sub-space engines to travel to far systems.
3. have nav beacons instead of gates because for me the gates restrict the openness of space.
4. my ship to have decent cargo space so trading other than stripping lockers (see point 1) is doable.

Just some thoughts.

[Observe]

Good thoughts DarthVain!

Some of your points are already being taken care of by Egosoft (or are at least on their radar). Others are fairly simple to add, and definitely worthy of consideration for sure! Once I get past this first stage, I'll create a list of the various ideas people are suggesting, so we can keep track of them all and implement them as we make progress.

[euclid]

Nice idea Observe and about time someone raised it

Okeey....I agree with everything that has been said so far. In general I'd like an X4 that has some features of the classic Elite, random events far out of every static zone, difficult to master but very rewarding, usually with a ship upgrade that is unique and useful. The game engine that CBJ coded invites for such events as some of you may not be aware that a dynamic temp zone is created around you if you leave a static zone. Within that zone many things can happen, mysterious encounters, secrets to be found etc. .
Of course this would require the Skunk to have a jump drive, a powerful booster that doesn't drain shield energy (who got that idea anyway) and a universal storage that can hold a decent amount of everything.

But let's don't get ahead of us because atm some very important script features are missing (for example <key_pressed key="..), not to mention the missing UI editing (atm you can't even code a decent conversation which provides player choices unless you find a conversation that formally fits and then replace $OBJECT$ etc. - what a pain !!).

So back to basic things (small steps) until some nice dev (*pokes CBJ*) implements some of these utterly important modding features

What I do not like in X:R (and do not wish to encounter in X4):

• platform NPC traders: Really folks, who is going to open boxes and lockers to sell snails and mining equipment for a few credits? Either remove those NPCs or give them some job that is useful.
  
  Station building: Why a CV? It is not part of the station and hence it will always be vulnerable and needs an engineer and a defense officer, and still it can be destroyed and then there is no way to continue with the station building. And even if the station is build fully, with all extensions and upgrades then the CV is useless. All station repairs are done by the station's engineer. Even if it would becomes part of the station (read: the CV disappears), then not only the architect but all the personnel should be part of the station's management.
  
  Ship building: It has been said already but let me say it again: why can't we build ships like in previous X games via blueprints? And why are there ships in the code but not in the game? It's not like there are too many different one already!
  
  NPC for hire: So you got yourself a nice ship and or a station; the ship comes with a captain if you have ordered it at the ship trader, the station has, except the architect, no personnel at all. Off you go, from NPC station to the next, form one zone the the other trying to find engineers, managers, defense officers and maybe also a specialist to boost you station's production. Ohh wait, you can't because there is already a marine officer, a captain and a pilot on board the Skunk (just for the case you come across a juicy boarding object) and it's getting tight back there. Well, besides that you can spend many hours searching for the right NPC to hire and then shuttle him/her back to your station/ship. Please, don't get me wrong here, the idea of personnel is nice (we had some similar mods in previous X game) but hey, there is a better way to get those. Just have a personnel agent somewhere and order all the NPCs you need and they'll be sent directly to you station/ships.
  
  Trading & drones: As it is atm the cargo lifters do the off/loading process and the freighters are in a docking position close to the station (sometime too close). There are only a few docking positions and only a few drone docks which results in long queues of freighters waiting for their turn. Often the wait times are so long that the reservation expires and then we have a problem. Sometime cargo lifters get destroyed and the station or freighters have too few (or even none) and so the trading process never finishes.
  In previous X game we had this nice feature of a transporter beam. Now what, 50 years later, this invention is lost it seems. Time to re-invent it! Dump the cargo lifters and let the freighters beam their wares from or to the station.
  
  Combat drones There are already several formations implemented but apparently not used in the game. If you (or one of your ships) launches drones they fly about like a disturbed swarm of angry bees. It would be actually a cool feature to send out a drones in a set formation on either protect or defend with tactics evasive, normal or aggressive. For example, just imagine you have a sphere of, say 30 "aggressive" drones around your ship that will fire on every enemy in range.
  
  Building locations As you know there are preset locations for building stations, usually 2 in each zone, all located roughly in one plane. I do understand that stations should be built in a static zone but why these location restrictions? Relax the condition to allow station build above or below the main plane and add locations to Maelstrom.
  
  Weapon variety: There is very little variety in weapon effects; the mining laser has a special purpose, ok, bu then there is only the shotgun (inertial hammer) which fires multiple bullets with a chance of ricochet and that's about it. What happened to the shield damage (ion disruptor), hull damage (mass driver) and aoe (psg, faa) weapons? What about the variation in range and what happened to the tractor beam?

Enough for now before I get carried away

Cheers Euclid

[Lc4Hunter]

Hy Observe, glad to hear you´re watching my work
I like it when people like my work

I also think that Highways have some potential. And also the idea with the highway-ring sounds good because you can make huge sectors with it, letting them the feeling from Rebirth.

BUT! i would love to see that highways a bit more realistic.
It makes no sense highways have so much curves without having segments redirecting them. I hope you understand what i´m meaning.

Just a very simple drawing of what i mean:
[ external image ]

The yellow lines are the highways, the circles are the gates and the short red lines are segments for the stabilization and redirection of the highways. You can imagine them like gates, or those structers you have seen in Albion Prelude.
I would love to see this later and would also make the models for this

As i know the highways are just 3d models placed in the sector and labled as "highway" - so this should be a very easy way of changing the sectorlayout.

I know it´s very unlogical but if you would use always the same highwaysegments or just a few different segments, you could save a lot of work and (system)ressources:

Just an example for some basic "different" styles you could use.
[ external image ]

[KRM398]

WELL OK THEN: Ideas I'd like to see:

1) boarding ships is harder, as it is once you get a million dollar crew its guaranteed successful...nothing is guaranteed and shouldn't be.
a) have a set percentage that can vary depending on marine content, for example if all recruits, less chance if mixed with medium marines, better and best all medium and elites, but even at best chance, not a sure thing.
b) freighters of course would be easiest, maybe 50% chance every time up to 75% with better marines.light military like light sul..less chance its military after all..so 30-50% chance not matter how good the marines are, and more casualties these ships will also have marines defending.Heavy ships even harder, if you cap a heavy carrier, then its a matter for bragging and celebration, of course its only a 20-30% chance to start but if you pull it off then the rush would be worth it, but at a high cost in dead marines.

2) hacking should count as capping ships, ok we have hacking drones that can shut down the entire ship...so if you suddenly found yourself out of electricity and air in space you'd jump ship, right? maybe 25% chance or if not they jump away.

3) different loot drops so you can use what you find to help fix up capped or shot up ships..shields and weapons and missiles, enough said.

4) smaller ships are too small...way to small, ok fighters maybe not, but drones bigger than fighters,really, and small freighters that have no engineers or defense officers, only a pilot? How small do they think a cargo ships with 12k-18k storage is? Needs resized to 1/4-1/2 that of rehanas and cargo boosted to match

just an idea or two that didnt look right to me here.

[UniTrader]

As i know the highways are just 3d models placed in the sector and labled as "highway" - so this should be a very easy way of changing the sectorlayout.

I know it´s very unlogical but if you would use always the same highwaysegments or just a few different segments, you could save a lot of work and (system)ressources:

they are defined with splines from my understanding, so the easiest way to do this would be to place a "gate" on the defining points. there may be too few of them in the vanilla sectors (two per Zone iirc - one entry, one exit) but if they are custom design it would be a diffrent matter.

regarding the mass traffic: my biggest issue with it is that it is noticeable non-persistent, especially at the tube entries and exits (ships disappear there or are spawned) but its nummbers need to be reduced a bit too.

and @Observe i am following a diffrent approach when modding Rebitrh: i wont try to make a classical X out of it, i will extend the Concepts which XR is based on, because these are not completely wrong but not really complete in some places

[Observe]

@euclid and KRM398: Thanks for great ideas to add to the list!

@Lc4Hunter: Excelent layout possibilities. I'm looking forward to seeing how they may work out.

@UniTrader: Yes, you are right. The highways are defined by splines. This is something I need to spend some time grasping better. In my modding tutorial, I simply copied the spline definitions from an existing sector into the new one I created, but that method isn't good enough if we want to create our own highway layouts (which is what we need to do).

I think we are on the same page in terms of interest in extending existing Rebirth capabilities and concepts. My approach is that part of the way to do that, is to "extend" Rebirth back to its X roots (aka X2/X3) and then once there, grow it more into that mystical vision of X4 that we all share in some fashion.

Thanks for input!

[St4n]

Thx, for considering my highway-idead.


Since there are other ideas arround I want to throw another suggestion into the pool.

How about a trading-hub? It's basicly some sort of trading-station as in X3 but with a more complex implementation.

The trading-hub is basicly a huge space-city without it's own dedicated production and a lot of docking ports. It serves as centralized point for everything that doesn't need to be on every individual station.

It's main point is to centralize trading and balance out the economy.
Simply because the player (and the ai traders) can buy and sell every
ware on it. And now the trick:
If it has wares below a certain treshold it slowly produces this wares and buy/sells them at a high price, if it has wares above a certain treshold it consumes this wares and buys/sells them at a low price.
So there can never be a dead-end production line that can't produce, because every station in the chain has full storages, because the final product isn't needed. The same goes for no production because the raw materials are missing. It can get realy slow, but will never come to a stop.
Since the prices are according to the amount currently present the wares produced in the sector will mostly have a low price while the wares needed will mostly have a high price.

Example (numbers are only taken for this example)

Spoiler

Show

It can store 100 food-rations.
If it has below 20 it slowly produces them while buying/selling at the highest price. -> If food-rations are desperatly needed in the sector they will be bought at this price while ai-traders are tempted to sell their food-rations there.
21 to 79 -> only balanced by price/amount
If it has above 80 it slowly consumes them while buying/selling at the lowest price. -> If food-rations are overproduced they will sell at this price while ai-traders are tempted to buy their food-rations there.

There are 2 positive side effects:
1. You can also centralize stuff like bars, missions, etc. at the trading-hub and remove them from the individual stations.

2. The engine uses the masstrafic as connection between stations (transfer products) so you can still retain the masstraffic between the hub and the individual stations. (So you don't need masses of individual traders for each sector.) If you only put transporters for wares/passangers in the masstrafic it would be much more believable that they all follow a dedicated line at the same speed. (something like public transportation instead of individual "cars" for every worker)
Tough it would work also without masstraffic, but than you need to regularly check and spawn the traders so product transfer is realized.

Note: With the trading-hub you add the opportunity to centralize nearly everything, but you can still retain some stuff (like special offers) to the stations, so players can explore if they want, but don't need to if they simply want basic trading and missions.

[Observe]

How about a trading-hub?

I think that's a brilliant idea! [ external image ]

That way, far-flung stations mainly would have traffic supplying the hub station much the way outlying farms supply a city with produce so we don't have to be running around all over the place looking for a sack of potatoes or whatever.

[Observe]

Progress report:

Yesterday, I began converting Rebirth to match the X3 map layout. I'm starting out with a small number of sectors (5-10) for proof of concept in terms of seeing how the game feels and operates with X3 layout concept. If all goes well, we can begin inserting the remaining 200+ X3 sectors into our new Rebirth map.

As soon as I've completed the prototype "mini-map" (possibly today), I'll ask people to join the project team, so we can begin experimenting with some of the ideas expressed, and people can contribute according to their interests.

Thanks

[YorrickVander]

Will be very interested to see the results of this I must admit I was thinking more X3birth, since that game works rather better

[Staberind]

I admit, I too had an "omg of course!" moment when i saw the trading hub idea, in x3, most sectors had one, and they are notable for their lack here,

Having a central structure in most zones, bristling with trade and mission offers, colour coded, and the other somewhat far flung factories having a few central buy/sell and landing points, (taxi missions, perhaps) might be a balanced mix of x3 and x4.

also, a personal irritation; I understand the logic of there being a horizontal plane between gates and structures, however, we are in space, can we not think in more than two dimensions? every station has a top and a bottom, the top surfaces feature landing pads, etc, and the bottom is just there for decor. if we imagine 4 gates and the space between them as a flat plane, its simple, but, if we imagine a large sphere in the midway of a set of gates, and placing the structures randomly within that sphere, have the tops pointing inwards, and the bottoms pointing outwards, thus immersing us even further into the notion that "up and down" are essentially meaningless, thus: trade/mission hubs, close to center of sphere, spheroid, all outer surfaces equalling "Up" thus being a 3 dimensional hub, as opposed to bidirectional. then, the vanilla XR factories and other ancillary structures with their "Up" facing inward towards the central hub. at varying distances.

I wanted to propose this thought as early as possible, in case people like it

also, bidirectional highways, as above, with the rectangular cross section, I like that idea a lot.

does that make any sense? or did I play "descent" too much....?

[Observe]

I wanted to propose this thought as early as possible, in case people like it

I like it! Your ideas are definitely ones I will take a close look at as we start adding stations and connecting jumpgates.

[St4n]

also, a personal irritation; I understand the logic of there being a horizontal plane between gates and structures, however, we are in space, can we not think in more than two dimensions? every station has a top and a bottom, the top surfaces feature landing pads, etc, and the bottom is just there for decor. if we imagine 4 gates and the space between them as a flat plane, its simple, but, if we imagine a large sphere in the midway of a set of gates, and placing the structures randomly within that sphere, have the tops pointing inwards, and the bottoms pointing outwards, thus immersing us even further into the notion that "up and down" are essentially meaningless, thus: trade/mission hubs, close to center of sphere, spheroid, all outer surfaces equalling "Up" thus being a 3 dimensional hub, as opposed to bidirectional. then, the vanilla XR factories and other ancillary structures with their "Up" facing inward towards the central hub. at varying distances.

This sounds very good, but I fear that it would cause more problems to the player than giving benefits.
Like "OMG, we can walk arround on stations now !"
1h later "God, why do I have to walk arround on that damn stations?"
While I like to have spherical sectors it may bring heavy navigation issues. The human is comfortable with navigating on planes, so no real up/down may cause irritation and the player get's lost in the sector. Also the 2D map wouldn't help much, because you can't see at which "hight" any entity is.

Maybe it would be easier to create multiple planes within a sector, but than you still have up/down. Sadly, there is no real middle way executing this, because immersion is created by no up/down while for a human to easily navigate up/down is needed.

Note: I don't want to talk bad about your idea, that are only my personal toughts about that matter. I try to be as much objective as I can.

[DeadlyDa]

Hi Observe. Good to see this progressing.

You already know my thoughts on creating "X4" from our previous discussions, and I'll support this effort in any way I can.

Clearly this is a lot of work, and will take time. The magnitude of the effort required to fully realize a more X3-like gaming experience is huge. However I believe the result would be terrific game...the one many of us want to play.

[KRM398]

I play a lot as a salvager/mercenary pilot. to me getting to a full sized carrier is the end game since I play as one man against the universe.We've had pirate sectors for a while, but how about a pirate economy...not a full economy of course but sectors that buy and sell with the pirates and them with it. Teladi of course but split might consider it for things that are slightly illegal or hard to get. Breaks down to black marketers in stations and hailing you from passing ships, offering things you couldn't get with your present faction...at inflated prices of course.

We've all played against the pirates in the X games a few played as pirates too.As someone who played the edge of the law a bit I saw things like this as missing. People who 'can get you anything for a price' at stations and even making covert deliveries in space."meet me at x-y-z coordinates and I'll deliver your goods."

Could even be turned into delivery missions 'don't let anyone scan you before you get there' or 'we'll pay big money for a load of HEPC right now' so that pirates aren't just patrols sneaking past, they have a civilization of their own, or nearly so.

[DarthVain]

Now if we could kill off "Danger... Entering Atmosphere" and be able to enter the atmosphere of the planets, that would also be a great achievement and what opportunity to have stations hovering a few kms above the planet surface

[Observe]

Now if we could kill off "Danger... Entering Atmosphere" and be able to enter the atmosphere of the planets, that would also be a great achievement and what opportunity to have stations hovering a few kms above the planet surface

Unfortunately I don't see that happening without procedural terrain generation - which Rebirth engine is not capable of. I suppose they could add a module for procedural generation at some point, but I don't see any indication of Egosoft going in that direction any time soon.